Western Sahara's economy: phosphate, fish and a question of consent

Who counts what Western Sahara produces

Most published figures for Western Sahara's economy are counted inside somebody else's. The United States announced its recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the territory on 10 December 2020, and the United States Geological Survey's Minerals Yearbook for 2020 and 2021, which records that decision, reports the mineral industry of the Western Sahara region inside its chapter on Morocco. Wikipedia's article on the territory's economy states the general case in a line: most economic activity in Western Sahara happens within the framework of the economy of Morocco.

Morocco's statistics office, the Haut-Commissariat au Plan, counts people by Moroccan region. Its census of 1 September 2024 found 451,028 people in Laâyoune-Sakia El Hamra and 219,965 in Dakhla-Oued Ed-Dahab. Those are Moroccan units, and Wikipedia lists three such regions as within or partly within Western Sahara, so the census totals and the territory's outline do not coincide. A United Nations press release on the Special Committee on Decolonization's meeting of 16 June 2026 gave the territory 612,000 people on 266,000 square kilometres.

On the other side the claim is written into a constitution. The text the Polisario Front's 14th Congress adopted for the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic in December 2015 states in Article 17 that public property belongs to the people and comprises mineral wealth, energy resources, underground wealth and territorial waters. Article 46 postpones the rest: a market economy and private initiative are to be recognised after the complete recovery of national sovereignty. The republic's official currency is the Sahrawi peseta, though the Algerian dinar and the Mauritanian ouguiya are the main currencies in practice in the territories it controls, and the Moroccan dirham is used mainly on the Moroccan-administered side.

How phosphate travels from Bou Craa to the sea

Spain found the phosphate. Britannica dates the discovery of large deposits at Bu Craa, in the northern part of Spanish Sahara, to 1963 and the start of mining to 1972. When Spain agreed in Madrid on 14 November 1975 to leave, the publicised terms, as the historians Virginia Thompson and Richard Adloff give them, let it keep 35% of Fosbucraa, the company that worked the deposit, with 65% going to Morocco.

The rock reaches the coast on a conveyor belt, and its length depends on who measured it. OCP Group, the Moroccan state company that owns the mine, gives 102 kilometres from Boucraa to the beneficiation plant and wharf at Laayoune. Wikipedia's article on the territory gives 98 kilometres, Britannica more than 60 miles, or 100 kilometres. Britannica adds that the belt was frequently damaged after 1976 in the guerrilla war the Sahrawis conducted against Morocco, which fortified the triangle formed by the Bu Craa mines, Laayoune and Smara.

What the mine ships and to whom

Phosphate de Bou Craa, or Phosboucraa, a wholly owned subsidiary of OCP, runs the site. The USGS gave it a capacity of 2.6 million tonnes of phosphate rock a year in 2020, when phosphate rock production in Morocco, as the Survey counts it, came to 37.4 million tonnes, and put Bou Craa's share of Morocco's reserves at 2%, the share OCP also states in 2026. Wikipedia puts the mine's output at about 10% of Morocco's, with no year attached.

Exports nearly halved in 2019. Phosboucraa shipped 1.0 million tonnes of phosphate rock that year against 1.9 million in 2018, its lowest for five years, and the USGS attributed the fall to the political conflict over the territory's sovereignty. India took 49% of the 2019 shipments, New Zealand 32%, China 12% and Brazil 7%. Pressure has also gone through the buyers. In 2020 the Polisario Front brought legal action against New Zealand's superannuation fund for accepting what it called "blood phosphate" from the territory, according to Wikipedia's history of Western Sahara.

What Morocco has invested at Bou Craa

Phosboucraa began a $2.2 billion expansion at Bou Craa in 2019, covering a larger mining site, a fertiliser plant of 1 million tonnes a year and better port infrastructure, which the USGS expected to be complete by 2022. OCP states that 100% of the profits of Phosboucraa are systematically reinvested in what it calls the Southern Provinces of Morocco, and that it is building an industrial platform at Laayoune. Freedom House, in its report for 2024, records the objection made by Sahrawi activists, who say that employers in phosphate mining, a predominant source of jobs, favour Moroccan settlers.

Why European courts ruled on fish and fruit

The consent question has been argued in most detail in Luxembourg, because the European Union's agreements with Morocco have to state where they apply. A 2012 agreement liberalising trade in farm and fishery products never mentioned Western Sahara, and on 10 December 2015 the General Court annulled the Council's decision to conclude it, reading "the territory of the Kingdom of Morocco" as including Western Sahara. The Court of Justice set that aside on 21 December 2016. Given "the separate and distinct status guaranteed to the territory of Western Sahara under the Charter of the United Nations", it held that the agreements did not apply there, that the people of the territory were a third party whose consent was not apparent, and that the Polisario Front therefore lacked standing to challenge them.

The Union answered with agreements written to apply in the territory. The Council approved an agricultural agreement on 28 January 2019 and, after the European Parliament's consent on 12 February, the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership Agreement on 4 March 2019. Its four-year protocol allocated fishing opportunities to the EU in exchange for an overall financial contribution of €208 million, a substantial part of which, the Council said, would promote the sustainable development of the fisheries economy in Morocco and the Western Sahara fisheries sector. The agreement entered into force on 18 July 2019.

The Commission and the European External Action Service consulted before those decisions, and on 4 October 2024 the Court of Justice found that they had consulted the territory's present inhabitants, most of whom do not belong to the people of Western Sahara, a large part of which has lived in exile in Algeria since the 1970s. It allowed that consent could be presumed where an agreement imposes no obligation on that people and gives it "a specific, tangible, substantial and verifiable benefit" from the territory's natural resources, proportional to how far they are exploited. The 2019 agreements met the first condition and failed the second, because no financial contribution reached that people for the exploitation of the territory's resources or the waters next to it. The fisheries decision had expired in July 2023; the court kept the farm agreement's effects for 12 months from the day of judgment.

What the Atlantic fishing grounds have been worth

Fishing is the older trade. Canary Islands fishermen had worked the coast since the 18th century, and in September 1881 the Sociedad Pesquerías Canario-Africanas built a pontoon in the bay of Río de Oro after local leaders ceded it the Dakhla peninsula. Britannica records dried fish going from the territory to the Canary Islands.

Wikipedia's main article on the territory describes its economy as based almost entirely on fishing, which employs two-thirds of the workforce, with mining, agriculture and tourism adding modest income; it gives no year for that share. Most food for the towns is brought in from Morocco, because the territory lacks the rainfall for sustainable farming.

Both claimants have put the waters into law. Morocco approved two laws in January 2020 delineating its territorial waters and an exclusive economic zone off the Western Saharan coast, and its foreign minister said the legislation aimed partly to reaffirm sovereignty over "its actual borders, maritime and terrestrial", according to the International Crisis Group. The Polisario Front rejected the move. The Sahrawi constitution's Article 17 lists territorial waters among the public property of the people.

In a legal opinion forwarded in July 2009 and published in February 2010, the European Parliament's Legal Service found that fishing by European vessels in Western Sahara's waters under the agreement then in force breached international law. In April 2010 the Norwegian salmon company EWOS stopped buying fish oil from Western Sahara and Morocco, purchases of around 10 million euros a year, as "not being in line with the Norwegian authorities' recommendations".

The European Commission now lists the agreement as dormant: the partnership exists, but with no protocol since 17 July 2023 there are no rules on catches or contributions, so the EU fleet cannot fish in Moroccan waters, by direct licence included.

Who has licensed the seabed off Western Sahara

After exploitable oil fields were located in Mauritania, TotalEnergies and Kerr-McGee were awarded contracts in 2002 to explore off the territory on behalf of Morocco's Office National de Recherches et d'Exploitations Pétrolières. The United Nations Legal Counsel, Hans Corell, answered the Security Council's question about those contracts in a letter dated 29 January 2002. They were not illegal, he wrote, but further exploration and exploitation "in disregard of the interests and wishes of the people of Western Sahara" would violate the principles of international law.

The Congressional Research Service called that finding "not readily enforceable" in October 2014 but said it had affected the calculations of private companies; Moroccan officials and some firms, it noted, assert that their deals uphold local needs and interests. TotalEnergies decided in December 2004 against renewing its licence. Kerr-McGee left in May 2006, after shareholders such as the National Norwegian Oil Fund sold out. The US company Kosmos Energy began an offshore exploration contract in 2013, which drew criticism from Western Sahara Resource Watch, and it became known in December 2014 that Seabird Exploration had run seismic surveys offshore. Desertec, a Munich-based solar company, declined to place a plant in the territory for "reputational reasons".

The Polisario Front has concluded its own offshore agreements with other oil companies, the CRS reported in 2014. Freedom House wrote in its 2024 report that the Sahrawi Republic routinely signs exploration contracts that cannot be implemented given the territory's status, and Wikipedia's economy article adds that the zones it offered lie in the part Morocco administers. In 2014, by estimates the same article repeats, the territory produced no oil and consumed 1,700 barrels a day.

Onshore, the USGS yearbook for 2020 and 2021 lists Moroccan state exploration studies in the south of the territory for copper, gold, uranium, niobium and rare-earth elements at five sites, from Al Warma to Twihinate-Center. Britannica records sources of potash and iron ore at Agracha.

How Morocco pays for the territory it administers

Morocco subsidises the provinces it administers. The Wikipedia account describes cut-rate fuel, related subsidies and price controls on basic goods, offered to appease nationalist dissent and to draw Sahrawis and other communities from Morocco to settle, and calls the result a state-dominated economy. The Congressional Research Service wrote in October 2014 that the territory may be a financial liability for Morocco because of its infrastructure spending and the benefits reportedly provided to Moroccan settlers, and that its known and potential resources may be a long-term economic boon.

A Moroccan state-supported body has published criticism of the results. Between December 2012 and October 2013 the Economic, Social and Environmental Council issued reports proposing a new development model for the territory, and the first of them called high youth and female unemployment "real problems". Morocco's New Development Model for the Southern Provinces is the frame for the regional programmes that the vice-president of Dakhla's regional tourism council described to Médias24 in December 2023.

The two positions met at the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization on 16 June 2026. Morocco's delegate said Morocco had invested much money in the territory, and Ghalla Bahiya of the Dakhla-Oued Ed-Dahab regional council spoke of a "trajectory of transformation". A petitioner on the other side, Agron Pali of the Global Monitoring Center, proposed an "International Trust Fund for the Natural Resources of Western Sahara" under a neutral body.

Morocco paved the road through the UN-monitored buffer strip at Guerguerat in 2016, and as its trade with Mauritania and West Africa grew, the International Crisis Group wrote in 2021, the road became more important to Rabat; the Polisario Front rejected it as a breach of the buffer zone that the 1991 ceasefire did not include. Pro-Polisario civilians blocked it on 21 October 2020, Moroccan troops reopened it on 13 November, and the Front declared the ceasefire over the next day; Morocco then said it would keep troops at Guerguerat indefinitely to protect the passage of goods. The United States proclamation behind the recognition, dated 4 December 2020 and published on 15 December, promised to encourage economic and social development in the territory and to open a consulate in Dakhla to promote economic and business opportunities. The House of Commons Library reported in June 2025 that no progress had been made on the consulate.

What Dakhla earns from wind and visitors

Tourism around Dakhla rests on the wind, which blows there for more than 300 days a year, the BBC reported from the lagoon, and Dakhla hosted the opening event of the 2015 Kitesurfing World Cup series under sponsorship from Richard Branson's Virgin group. The vice-president of the regional tourism council told Médias24 in December 2023 that the city had recorded 192,393 overnight stays in 2022, 126,043 of them by international visitors and 66,350 by domestic ones, and 333,604 by the end of September 2023.

Morocco's tourism observatory counts classified accommodation only. Classified accommodation in the Dakhla-Oued Eddahab region recorded 308,000 overnight stays from January to the end of July 2026, 26% more than in the same months of 2025, at an occupancy of 64%, up 15 points, the state news agency MAP reported on 30 September 2026. Morocco's national count rose 8% over the same months. Médias24 did not say which establishments its figures covered, so the two series cannot be set side by side.

The HCP census recorded the Dakhla-Oued Ed-Dahab region growing by 4.40% a year between 2014 and 2024, and its towns by 5.22%, against 0.85% across everything the census covered. Who gains from the growth is argued in the same terms as the phosphate. A Sahrawi former instructor told the BBC that he never received authorisation from the Moroccan authorities to open his own business and that only two Sahrawi kitesurfing teachers were left; another said the only hotel that hired him paid €200 a month. A Sahrawi hotel owner in Dakhla told the same reporter he was happy with the Moroccan administration. Freedom House wrote in its 2024 report that the economic activity generated by companies exploiting the territory's natural resources generally does not benefit the Sahrawi population.

How the camps near Tindouf make a living

The Sahrawi Republic's administration sits at Rabouni, among five refugee camps near Tindouf in Algeria that were set up in 1975, and the camps' economy runs on aid. UNHCR, which coordinates 28 partners in Tindouf under the Sahrawi Refugee Response Plan, describes the refugees as relying on humanitarian assistance for survival. The World Food Programme, which has supported the camps since 1986 at the Algerian government's request, says on its Algeria page, read in October 2026, that 78% of Sahrawi refugees are food insecure or at risk of it. It distributes almost 134,000 rations of cereals, pulses, sugar, vegetable oil and blended food through 116 distribution points, and school meals to around 30,000 children. Basic food comes in through the Algerian port of Oran to Rabouni, where the Polisario Front and the Western Sahara Red Crescent organise its distribution, according to Wikipedia's article on the camps.

How many people the rations feed is disputed: Algerian authorities estimated 165,000 refugees, UNHCR cut its working figure to 90,000 in 2005, and Oxfam put the camps at 173,000 people in May 2020.

A simple monetary economy began in the camps in the 1990s, by the same article's account, after Spain decided to pay pensions to Sahrawis forcibly drafted into its colonial Tropas Nómadas; more came from Sahrawis working in Algeria or abroad and from herding. Freedom House found little formal economic activity in the camps in its 2024 report, no functioning labour market in Polisario-controlled territory and a Sahrawi trade union, UGTSARIO, that is largely inactive. Matthew Porges of the University of St Andrews, writing in Forced Migration Review, notes that making mud bricks employs many refugees and that temporary labour migration runs from the camps to Spain and Algeria.

East of the berm, in what the Polisario Front calls the Liberated Territories, Porges estimates 30,000 to 40,000 people, mostly nomadic herders, and calls the figure even harder to measure than the camps'. After the war ended in 1991 the Front, which keeps substantial camel herds of its own, cleared landmines, installed and maintained wells and set about rebuilding the nomadic economy there. Porges calls "the most promising strategy" one the refugees found themselves. In 2016 Taleb Brahim, a refugee who had trained as an engineer in Syria, began growing barley hydroponically to feed his goats. In 2017 the World Food Programme's Innovation Accelerator in Munich selected the system for funding, and Brahim went on to train more than a thousand refugees in cheaper units built from local materials; the units were also tested in camps in Chad, Jordan, Sudan and Kenya.